Make no mistake about it.
We are smack-dab in the middle of a depression and there is simply no way out of this until the excessive debt is cleared from the system.
Sure, we may see some positive GDP growth here and there, but the nearly one in four Americans that are out of work make it clear that real growth – sustainable growth – is not coming back anytime soon.
Our political and economic leaders would have us believe that recovery is just a few months away (now that it is obvious that the green shoots, recovery and return to normal of 2010 was a fabrication).
A Wall Street Journal poll in September of 2010 found that 26% of Americans surveyed believe that the economy will improve in the next 12 months. It’s probably because they smoke a healthy dose of mainstream media’s optimism opium every morning and fail to follow the no holds barred economic reports of people like David Rosenberg:
A depression, put simply, is a very long period of economic malaise. A series of rolling recessions and modest recoveries over a multi-year period of general economic stagnation as the excesses from the prior asset and credit bubble are completely wrung out of the system. In baseball parlance, we are in the third inning of this current debt deleveraging ball game.
You know you’re in a depression when interest rates go to zero and there is no revival in credit-sensitive spending.
The economy is in a depression when the banks are sitting on $1.3 trillion of cash and yet there is no lending going on to the private sector. It’s otherwise known as a liquidity trap.
Depressions usually are caused by a bursting of an asset bubble and a contraction in credit, whereas plain-vanilla recessions are typically caused by inflation and excessive manufacturing inventories. You tell me which fits the bill today.
When almost half of the ranks of the unemployed have been looking for a job fruitlessly for at least six months, you know you are in something much deeper than a garden-variety recession. True, we can’t see the soup lines; the soup lines are in the mail — 99 weeks of unemployment cheques for over 10 million jobless Americans. Don’t be lulled into the view that we are into anything remotely close to a normal economic cycle.
It’s real and it’s happening right now – and it is likely going to get a whole lot worse.
Related Reading:
Rosenberg: This is a ‘Depression, Not Just Some Garden Variety Recession’
99er: ‘You Think I Look Forward to Collecting Unemployment? It Is F*cking Degrading’
Well, checks ARE much easier to create than actual soup.
A similar thought came to mind last week in the store. We don’t see the soup lines because there are none. They’re hidden in the grocery store lines with food stamps and/or state funded debit cards. These things didn’t exist in the late 20’s and early 30’s. It’s a very stealthy way to keep the clueless sheeple from connecting the dots.
Image is everything.
“Fake it til you make it”.
Well, well, well.
Is this basically like a “jobless recovery.” isn’t it?
If the checks stopped coming you’d see your revolution all right. That’s how they are keeping the lid on this thing. Mac has screamed it from the top of his lungs for months if not years. It HAS to end in hyperinflation, deflation or default it’s that simple. I’m not quite a knuckle dragger but even I can see that 2+2=4 and no amount of flowery, eloquent, hyperbolic, honey sweet pablum they spew from  their  sickening pie holes is gonna change that.
WAKE UP!!
Or you will soon see yourself living in the land of the fee,
Home of the knave.
What is debt? It is different for you and me vs. the government and bankers.   We lose everything, they write it off. After we are sheared like sheep, they will reset the counters and start again.Â
It is just an accounting game and it’s rigged against you.  Nothing you buy on credit is worth it. Don’t play in it, drive a beater, rent or buy a starter home. Stop feeding it, shut down the system of fraud.
Meanwhile Michelle Obama can rent a entire villa in Spain for her gal pals.   And the First Family Dog can be flown from Washington D.C. on a private jet to join the First Family on vacation in Maine.   Â
You people who voted this ass clown into office need your asses soundly beat. Daily.  Â
Soup Nazi: No soup for you.
My pop use to say “you can’t make chicken soup out of chicken shit”. Â
Last week when my wife left for the grocery store she said she was going to stand in the “soup line” because of the amount of food stamps or cards she see’s when she’s there.  People that are doing just what you said TnAndy, faking it till they make it.Â
I disagree. It’s not a depression; we could recover from a depression eventually. What we’re experiencing is a fundamental transformation. America will soon be indistinguishable from Zimbabwe.
Comments…..
Also, the food stamps are indicative of a ‘bread line’…don’t forget!
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Also, the food stamps are another ‘bread line’..don’t forget!
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Sorry, Gringo..didn’t read before I post.
Comments…..
Meanwhile Michelle Obama can rent a entire villa in Spain for her gal pals.
Paul Revere–this is her intent —to become the topic pizzing us off—my response to anyone who remarks on her spending—Michelle who??
Who’s Michelle?
Comments….. Mean while, the homeless in San Francisco’s Haight Asbury District are whining that McDonalds raised their Happy Meal price from $1.00 to $1.50.  They are whining that now they have to pan handle longer and go through the garbage in order to eat. I guess that’s better than having it end up at the dump. A 29 year old homeless able bodied man complaining about the price of a Happy Meal. He is not a happy camper.
Paul Revere has it right.
http://www.myfoxny.com/dpps/news/homeless-upset-about-mcdonalds-dollar-menu-increase-dpgoh-20100907-fc_9517802
What we need is price controls… McDonald’s obviously has no clue how to operate a business in San Francisco.
“Meanwhile Michelle Obama can rent a entire villa in Spain for her
gal pals.”
Instead of the soup line, we should form a line to do Michelle!
First there was the “jobless recovery”, a fantastic 50% success. No recovery but plenty of joblessness. Then “green shoots”, they wilted. The “summer of recovery”, looks like a heart patient with a triple by-pass in intensive care.
The depressin of the 30’s already has a name, “The Great Depression, “Great Depression II”  is just corny, let’s call it like it is and how history will refer to it. THE OBAMA DEPRESSION!
1. Â +1 at Paul Revere. Â No, I don’t mind if the Obama’s take a vacation here and there, but given the current state of things, they are pushing it…
2. Â Just to clarify the facts – that McDonald’s in SF raised the prices on the Value Menu from $1.00 to $1.50.
A $1.50 Happy Meal in SF would be insanely cheap. Â Hell, anything costing only $1.50 in SF is pretty darn cheap.
…but the point is well-taken.
Correction – it is actually called the “Dollar Menu.”
As Lionel Hutz would say, this is the worst case of false advertising since “The Neverending Story.”
This is something worse than a depression. It is a controlled currency collapse. In a garden variety depression the currency holds up (actually strengthens according to classic definition of deflation).
@Tom S. in LV: Back in 2007, I wrote a little essay entitled “World Depression II,” in which I gave five reasons why World Depression II will be much worse than World Depression I.
Tom S. in LV:Â How’s the housing out your way?Â
Gringo Malo is correct in that this is a transformation. This is an engineered depression. It is part of the plan to bring the US to it’s knees and it is working because we have so very much debt. We owe banks and they own us. We are thrown out of our jobs and homes and they get our money handed to them to sit on and it is called a necessary bailout.              And I agree with Paul Revere about whoever voted for this administration. I hope we can vote some sense back into Wash DC in november. And if that works, I hope most americans remember how close we came to loseing it and stop spending. Those bankers still want to own us and this nation and all the others too. Just a tiny bit greedy don’t you think?
Don’t forget the media. The reason we don’t see soup lines is because of the unemployment checks but also because it it not covered by the liberal, Obama loving press. That press has been pushing socialism for a couple decades. When this started we did see pictures of people living in RV’s and tents.But not  for over a year even though things are worse and many more people have been evicted or lost their jobs.Â
Gringo is so spot on it’s not even funny. It’s an economic transformation – there’s no recovering from this, at least not for America and most modernized countries. Not until folks inevitably get pissed off of getting thrown out of their homes while the banks are getting bailouts.
This is a shake down. There’s nothing Obama can do it about it and there’s nothing any new president or so-called “elected” official can do about it. Nah, if you want to stop this, if you want to change this, you need to wake your ass up and stop looking to other people to solve the problem, stop looking at your so-called elected officials to solve the problem… you’re a tool if you think those people are on your side – they aren’t – and even if they were on your side there isn’t a damn thing they can do to help you or stop this.
No, not this time. This time it’s up to you to stand up and be counted. To scream in unison with your friends, your family, and your soon to be ex-neighbours… “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH”.
They can only take what you let them, and they can’t stop you from taking back what is rightfully yours.
Gringo Malo,Â
Thanks I enjoyed the read. You are absolutly correct. I do think though that Obama will get the tag for this one, he did convince some of the American people maybe a lot of them, the naive head stuck in the sand types, that he would save the economy. He didn’t and he didn’t have a chance in hell of doing so.Â
Those of us who read history and know the true causes of the depression know that it really has very little to do with Obama even though he has contributed greatly, just as FDR, with his socialist giveaway programs and defict spending.   He is just the hapless child president in the big boy suit that is way in over his head. But it is fun to blame him anyway.
Obama is an idealist with only one agenda. Everything he does is subserviant to or supports his one single ideal, that is to elevate the poor into middle class status at the expense of the middle class. Leveling the playing field as he has said. But all that is really going to happen is that we of the middle class will see our standard of living reduced to ensure additional entitlement and transfer payments to the socially downtrodden. They will never be real middle class as that takes a work ethic and a desire to lift oneself up by one’s own bootstraps which is severly lacking amongst the poor. That is why they are poor. No other reason.
Anyway I’m just rambling now so I will end it but a quick note on the housing situation in Las Vegas. I work for a large gaming company. Years ago the talk in the office was about flipping houses. Now it is about strategic foreclosures. This is amongst people who are successful by any standard and are still employed. Vegas residential areas are looking like living ghost towns populated by zombies.
@ Tom S. in LV
Thanks for your point of view from that area.Â